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Rawalpindi is not as poor as it might look. A major metropolis with a strong lower middle class, it has long been a constituency for Pakistan's urban Islamists, the Jamaat-e-Islami, as well as a garrison town, a prime source of soldiers for Pakistan's Army. Then there is the victim, Salman Taseer, 46 years senior to his killer, the governor of the Punjab, a successful publisher and businessman who made a fortune in capital investment and management consultancy, son of a poet and writer and a stalwart of the liberal intelligentsia.
Taseer was from Lahore, a different sort of city than Rawalpindi. The most south Asian of Pakistan's major metropolises, it is the heart of the country's cultural life and the home of many liberals. It is in Lahore that a theatre flourishes and human rights organisations are based. The influence of the conservatives is strong but diluted. India is closer than Islamabad.
Taseer's many children reflect the occupations of Pakistan's elite - journalists with Western news organisations, a TV presenter, a writer in London.
Then, there is the crime scene. Taseer was gunned down - 27 bullets fired into him point-blank by Qadri as the rest of the security detachment apparently stood by - in Islamabad's Kohsar Market. Kohsar Market is not a bazaar, a chaotic souk of stalls and shouting, but a small and exclusive set of shops selling books, craftwork, imported groceries for the capital's expats and wealthy. Only a half-hour drive from where Qadri grew up, it is light years away from his world.
After the assassin, the victim and the scene come, inevitably, the political parties. Qadri was not a political man, though the murder was carried out "with the assistance and conspiracies of religious and political factions", according to the FIR. A dozen police and security men have been detained along with members of his family, allegedly complicit in the killing. But no one is claiming that Qadri was connected to any major organisation. Taseer, however, was a veteran figure of the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), the party of Benazir and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and of current president Asif Ali Zardari.
The PPP is, after the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) in Karachi, the most moderate, more pro-Western, more liberal Pakistani political force. Few politicians stood up to back him last week. Taseer's statements supporting a change in the harsh blasphemy laws and his overt backing of Aasia Bibi, a 45-year-old Christian woman on death row after conviction for denigrating Islam and the Prophet Muhammad, were what provoked Qadri to kill him.
Taseer's position was far ahead of that taken by his party. "The position is that we will not allow the misuse of the blasphemy law against the minorities and vulnerable sections of society," said PPP spokesman Farhatullah Babar. "But we have to look at the timing. In this charged atmosphere, it is not possible to review these laws." After the death, Nawaz Sharif, leader of the conservative opposition Pakistan Muslim League (N), restricted himself to saying that the late governor of the Punjab, his own home state, should have "adopted a more balanced approach".
The lack of condemnation by Pakistan's politicians as a whole was deafening. Then, finally, beyond the assassin, the victim, the scene and the political calculations is the country. For the assassination of Taseer, like all acts of political and religious violence, poses questions as much as it makes statements. The murder asks: Can a liberal find a place in today's Pakistan? The murder of Taseer - particularly given the confrontation between the radical extremist and the liberal businessman with a penchant for quoting British Victorian historians - would seem to play directly into the classic analysis of Pakistan as a nation being fought over by the "moderates" and the extremists.
This is the vision most often projected, particularly in the West and in India. However, there is another analysis which may be more useful. Pakistan is certainly diverse - as is India. It is certainly fragmented, but has nonetheless withstood a series of massive shocks over recent years which would have definitively fractured a weaker state. It is true that the exact role of Islam within Pakistan has always been debated. Is it a country of Muslims? Or a Muslim country? And there are both relatively secular "moderates" and religious extremists. If the religious Right is a fringe element, so too are the "moderates".
The "battlefield" prism obscures the critical mass in the middle which, while the two fringes exchange brickbats, is quietly forging a coherent, potent and fairly homogeneous identity. And it is the growing dominance of this mass in the middle which means that figures like Taseer - or indeed Benazir with her pro-Western, anticonservative rhetoric-are increasingly isolated and vulnerable. Around a dozen other members of the security team supposed to protect the dead governor have been arrested for alleged complicity.
Bodyguards are trained to react instantly, not to stand by while 27 bullets are being fired. Who is this middle ground? This "Pakistani street"? What has created them and what are their views? First, there is the long history of Pakistan as an Islamic state. Muhammad Ali Jinnah's vision of a country where men were free to go to their mosques, temples and churches was never realistic. Pakistan is now a country of 180 million people of whom the vast bulk are Muslim and which, as it has become increasingly distanced from British rule, has moved further and further towards Islamo-nationalism as the defining identity for the state and its individual citizens.
Second, there are internal and regional factors - the rule of Zia-ul-Haq and the Afghan war for example. Third, and far more important, there are broader trends affecting the whole of the Islamic world. From Delhi, Pakistan looks like the western flank of South Asia. From Damascus, Baghdad, Tehran, Istanbul, Algiers or Rabat, it looks like the eastern flank of the Middle East. From Morocco to Malaysia, the Islamic world has seen the progression and consolidation of a core conservative and politicised Islamo-nationalist identity over the last three or four decades. There is no reason why Pakistan should be an exception. This has been accelerated by a range of other factors. There has been rapid economic growth in Pakistan and it has one of the highest rates of urbanisation in Asia. This means the creation of a large lower middle class in major cities - the classic constituency of Islamists.
Equally, as in India, the last decade or so in Pakistan has seen the creation of an extraordinarily vibrant but often prejudiced and ill-informed television media which now penetrates into even the most basic of villages. Talk shows pedal the most outlandish conspiracy theories. Clerics spout bile on satellite channels to illiterate peasants. Finally, since 9/11, ties with the West have deteriorated while those with the Gulf have grown. In Karachi, the aspiration model is Dubai. Names of Pakistani children have been Arabicised.
The most popular ringtones, as they are in places like Egypt, are religious. What do these new urban masses think? This is best revealed not in Islamabad, nor in Lahore, and nor even in Rawalpindi. Take instead somewhere like Multan, once a provincial town in arid southern Punjab, and now a city of around 1.5 million where new hotels, shops, offices and religious schools are multiplying with equal rapidity. Take a university on its outskirts, where 14,000 students, the sons and daughters of the rapidly expanding Pakistani middle class, study in a middle-ranking college in a middle-sized town of mixed ethnic origin, close to the geographic centre of Pakistan, the point where the country's four provinces meet. If anyone was representative of what Pakistan - where the average age is 21, like Malik Mumtaz Qadri - will be and will think in a decade, they are.
Their worldview is deeply depressing. Their view of the West is overwhelmingly negative, coloured by conspiracy theories about the true perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks, anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism, a visceral anti-Americanism and a deep social conservatism. Their view of India was predictable - the old enemy. Their patriotism was assertive and unabashed. In Afghanistan and in Kashmir, Muslims were "as oppressed" as they were in Palestine, I was told. They all wanted "democracy" but said their politicians were corrupt and never helped the poor.
Though no one wanted clerics to rule, the laws of the country should however be in accordance with Sharia, they said. The students maintained a strict gender segregation. The girls were veiled. Many of the men were bearded. They were neither members of the Jamaat-e-Islami nor the ultra-Westernised elite youth. A poll of Pakistanis released last summer by the respected Pew Center reinforced how widespread such views are, even among the rural masses who follow more folksy and tolerant strands of Islam. More people see the al Qaeda, the Taliban, and homegrown groups such as the Lashkar-e-Taiba more favourably than the US.
More than 80 per cent supported segregating men and women in workplaces, stoning adulterers and whipping or amputation for thieves. Three in four endorse death penalty for apostasy. And 80 per cent said suicide bombing was un-Islamic. The youths sitting on the grass were thus situated between Taseer and his killer. They were entirely representative of "middle Pakistan".
Where does this leave the liberals of Pakistan? The only answer: isolated. One cause of Pakistan's chronic political instability is the gulf between the lives and views of the elite - especially the liberal elite - and those of the vast mass of the population. Taseer's killing is an extreme product of that instability. There will be more. This week, Sherry Rehman, the former PPP information minister who has also supported a reform of Pakistan's blasphemy laws, was under heavy protection in her Karachi home. Violent extremism thrives when the radicals are convinced of the support - or at least the tacit acquiescence - of the masses.
Malik Mumtaz Qadri's smile is an evidence of his belief that many, if not most, in Pakistan do back his act. The hundreds of lawyers, once seen as the spine of a new pro-democracy movement in Pakistan, who volunteered to represent him for free and mobbed him as he arrived for his first hearing, must have convinced him that he was not entirely wrong. But there is some hope. All political groupings, including religious parties, in the Punjab Assembly unanimously presented and passed a condemnation resolution against the assassination of Taseer, praising the dead man's political and social services last week.
The experience of conflict across the Islamic world and elsewhere since the early 1990s reveals that public opinion can shift dramatically when the reality of extremist violence on the streets becomes clear to the mass of the population. But before that happens, many more are likely to die. As the eminent commentator Irfan Husain said last week: "It is this hate-filled environment that has made rational discourse virtually impossible."
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